Printable View
Hi Everyone,
It's been a while since I've been here. Glad to be back though!
I have a quick question for someone knowledgable in Java (using 1.4.2_07):
I need to escape the "<" and ">" characters in a regex (more specifically, String.replaceAll() method), and I've tried everything from hex codes for the ascii values to escaping them with "\\>" and "\\<", but I still get an exception. I'm dyin here! Any ideas anyone??
Thanks
-ik
Hi there,
You don't need to escape "<" or ">" characters!
For example, this works perfectly to strip html tags from a string:
String test = "<html> test string </html>";
test = test.replaceAll("<.*>(.*)<.*>","$1");
test = test.trim();
test will contain: "test string".
Anyways incase its not something that obvious, I use java a lot so perhaps I can help... but first can you post the exception you are getting ?
Inferno.
Hey, thanks for the reply.
I solved the problem earlier by making a generic function that will escape any given string's special characters. Actually, I borrowed that function from javaalmanac.com (search for regular expression, the method is called escapeRE).
Anyway, turns out the problem wasn't in my regular expression string (that is, replaceAll(String regex, String replacement), in regex), but in my replacement string -- it needs to be escaped too (duh!). It only took me a few hours to figure that out hehe
Anyway, thanks again for the help. We should keep in touch as fellow Java programmers. :)
Have a nice day!
-ik